Power Management for Heterogeneous Clusters: An Experimental Study

Reducing energy consumption has a significant role in mitigating the total cost of ownership of computing clusters. Building heterogeneous clusters by combining high-end and low-end server nodes (e.g., Xeons and Atoms) is a recent trend towards achieving energy-efficient computing. This paper requires a cluster-level power manager that has the ability to predict future load, and server nodes that can quickly transition between active and low-power sleep states. In practice however, the load is unpredictable and often punctuated by spikes, necessitating a number of extra \"Idling\" servers.